TweakTown has reported that fewer than 5000 Radeon VII GPUs will be hitting the shelves come launch day, mid summer this year. According to its source, AMD will be making a net loss on each GPU sold to the consumer, as these are effectively just redeveloped M150 GPU accelerators originally designed for enterprise and data center use. The latter of which was announced and launched on the tail end of last year.
Due to the lack of availability TweakTown’s source suggest that if true, there’s likely to be a lack of aftermarket variants as well from other manufacturers.
We reached out to AMD for comment and it stated that: “While we don’t report on production numbers externally, we will have products available via AIB partners and AMD.com at launch of Feb. 7, and we expect Radeon VII supply to meet demand from gamers”.
AMD saying that it has AIB partners in tow clearly refutes TweakTown’s report, so we’ll be holding our breath on this one. On top of that, 5K units for the initial product launch/first run is a fairly standard business practice worldwide, typically with bigger batches to follow. If it is the case that Radeon VII is limited to only 5,000 samples, providing long-term driver support for the cards, wouldn’t make a whole lot of financial sense.
AMD’s announcement of its world first, commercially available, 7nm gaming GPU left a lot of us underwhelmed. Although the card can be quite competitive in some titles, versus its Nvidia RTX 2080 adversary (check out our full report here), it certainly wasn’t the announcement we were all hoping for, aka the arrival of Navi.